How to Monitor and Manage Product Engagement

Product engagement tells you how actively customers are using your product or platform. Tracking this alerts you to churn risks as well as upsell opportunities, empowering you to take appropriate action. You can measure product engagement by selecting key performance indicators. Systematically tracking these KPIs positions you to proactively manage and improve engagement. Here we’ll cover what product engagement is, why you need to manage it, how to measure it and how to automate engagement tracking and management.

What Is Product Engagement?

Product engagement refers to how and how often customers use your products. It encompasses several key elements:

• Which features customers use
• How many of your features your customers are using
• How advanced their feature usage is
• How consistently or sporadically they use those features
• How frequently they use your product as a whole
• How long they spend in your product

Product engagement can be considered globally with respect to how often customers use a product in general or on a granular level with respect to how frequently clients use specific features. It can also be considered in terms of account activity.

Why Manage Product Engagement?

Knowing how actively customers are engaging your product provides you with important insights you can put to practical use. For instance, low engagement can be an early warning sign that a customer is at risk of churning. When you spot this, you can take steps to intervene and increase the likelihood of renewal.

Tracking product engagement can also create sales opportunities. A highly engaged customer may be in the market for an upsell offer. Detecting this gives your sales team an opening to reach out. By helping decrease churn and increase upsells, product engagement tracking promotes higher revenue.

How Do You Measure Product Engagement?

You can use a number of metrics to measure product engagement. Some of the most important include:

1. License utilization
2. Product adoption
3. Product stickiness
4. Account growth rates
5. Number of integrations

These KPIs provide you with numbers you can use as a baseline to improve and optimize product engagement.

1. License Utilization

License utilization is one of the most basic engagement metrics. It tells you how many licensed users on an account are active users. You can measure this by dividing active users by total licenses and expressing the result as a percentage. The resulting number tells you whether a customer is actively using your product, which may be a sign of an upsell opportunity, or letting their license go unused, which may foreshadow churn if you don’t intervene.

2. Product Adoption

Product adoption is the stage in your customer journey where, ideally, they progress from a successful onboarding experience to active use of your product. You can use a number of types of KPIs to measure adoption. One of the most essential metrics is the adoption rate. To track this, divide the number of unique daily logins by the number of active account licenses. This will tell you how many of your active licensed users are logging in daily.

3. Product Stickiness

Another way to measure adoption is in terms of “stickiness,” which tracks how often customers return to your product after activation. One of the most important metrics for measuring stickiness is your ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) or DAU/MAU, converted into a percentage. This tells you how many of your monthly users actually use your product on a daily basis, making this metric a bit more targeted than product adoption.

Stickiness is how deep and engrained a customer’s use of your product is. The key to understanding your product stickiness is understanding your most sticky product features and the use cases they support.

4. Account Growth Rates

Customer engagement may grow or shrink, introducing another important KPI category to track. You can track how many customers increased or decreased usage of a product with respect to license utilization, adoption, stickiness or utilization of a specific feature. This allows you to flag accounts that show signs of decreasing utilization, as well as spot increasing utilization trends and sales opportunities.

5. Number of Integrations

Customers who are actually using your product will tend to integrate it with other apps they’re actively using. You can track this by tracing the number of integrations a customer has used. You may find it strategic to track this with reference to specific apps which are key to workflow in your market space.

How to Track and Improve Product Engagement

The most efficient way to track the KPIs discussed above is to use technology that allows you to automatically monitor product engagement KPIs. The Totango Spark platform’s Increase Customer Adoption SuccessBLOC module is designed for this task. In addition to coming out-of-the-box ready to track metrics such as those discussed above, it allows you to set goals for each KPI and to monitor progress through convenient dashboards and reports.

To promote progress toward your goals, the Increase Customer Adoption SuccessBLOC also includes SuccessPlays, automatically triggered or manual workflows which implement engagement best practices. For instance, if a customer’s usage is falling below target goals, this can trigger procedures to promote usage, such as reminding customers of product features or alerting a customer success manager to take appropriate action.

Automate Product Engagement Management to Promote Customer Retention

Product engagement can be defined in terms of how and how often your customers use your product. Tracking and managing it can help alert you to warning signs of churn as well as upsell opportunities so you can take appropriate actions. Key performance indicators for measuring product engagement including adoption, stickiness, account growth rates and license utilization. Using automated tools to track these KPIs positions you to take proactive steps to increase product engagement.